The drive unit of motor vehicles--engine and power transmission train--is increasingly subjected to regulating and control mechanisms. Using the control system of an automatic gear transmission as an example, this is to be further explained as follows: modem automatic transmission systems for motor vehicles will either be operated by means of an automatic gear shift (gear shift takes place as a function of certain input parameters, e.g. engine speed) or continuous variation (gears are shifted until the required transmission ratio has been set). Transmission control systems provided for either purpose use adaptive strategies to optimally adapt the family of gear shift characteristics (automatic gear shift) or family of control characteristics (continuously variable transmission) to the type of driver on the one hand ("long-term strategy"), or to a given environment ("medium-term strategy": for example, slip detection, towing a trailer, climbing a hill), and, finally, to the current driving situation ("short-term strategy": for example, overtaking another vehicle). By means of the long-term strategy, engine performance requirements demanded by the relevant driver are to be determined--for instance, as an average over a given time more engine performance will need to be made available to a "sporty" driver (a lot of acceleration events and high speed travel) than to an "economical" careful driver. For driver type detection, several different criteria will be used (for instance, position of drive pedal, duration and frequency of drive pedal kick-down operation, positioning speed of drive pedal) and evaluated empirically (test drives); once these have been filtered over an extended period, a numerical value is gained; this numerical value characterizes the relevant driver type. However, the disadvantage here is that these criteria for driver type detection, their evaluation, and filtering are empirical; accordingly, determining the numerical value is a very time-consuming process. And the numerical value gained in this way merely represents an indirect measure for the mean engine performance required by a given driver; thus it is not very suitable for drive unit control systems (engine control, transmission control).